NVIDIA and Japan are building the world's first national AI infrastructure — a massive Vera Rubin AI factory that will serve as a shared computing backbone for the country's entire physical AI ecosystem.

The facility, established by Japanese consortium Noetra Corp. and supported by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), will deliver 140 megawatts of data center capacity built on NVIDIA's DSX platform. It will house 13,750 NVIDIA Vera CPUs and 27,500 NVIDIA Rubin GPUs connected through NVIDIA Spectrum-X Ethernet networking and BlueField DPUs.

Powering the FRONTia Project

The AI factory will provide the computing foundation for Japan's FRONTia Project, a METI-led initiative to develop highly reliable multimodal foundation models for physical AI applications. The project brings together Japan's world-leading manufacturing expertise, real-world industrial data, and global technology leaders.

"Japan invented modern manufacturing. Now, it is building the AI factories that will power the next industrial revolution," said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA.

Open Models for National Ecosystem

Crucially, the pretrained weights of Noetra's multimodal foundation models will be made broadly available to domestic model developers and enterprises, alongside NVIDIA's software stack including Nemotron, Cosmos, Isaac GR00T, and NeMo libraries. This open approach is designed to accelerate development of AI agents, digital twins, robotics, and physical AI applications across Japan's economy.

"Japan has launched the FRONTia Project, which will serve as the core of the country's physical AI ecosystem," said Ryosei Akazawa, Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry. "By fostering collaboration between Japan and leading global innovators — including NVIDIA — and leveraging Japan's strengths, such as its onsite expertise and manufacturing technology infrastructure, we will build highly reliable multimodal foundation models."

Targeting 30% of Global AI Robotics Market

Japan's AI Robotics Strategy, released in March 2026, sets an ambitious goal: capture more than 30% of the global AI robotics market by 2040, representing an estimated $133 billion opportunity. The Noetra AI factory is the infrastructure anchor for that strategy.

As the facility expands, it will support training of trillion-parameter-scale AI models, giving organizations across Japan access to one of the world's most advanced AI environments. Hironobu Tamba, CEO of Noetra, emphasized the collaborative nature of the project: "Together with partners across Japan and around the world, Noetra will advance Japan-developed multimodal foundation models and accelerate the deployment of physical AI across Japanese industries."

Sovereign AI Goes National

The Japan-NVIDIA partnership is the most concrete expression yet of the sovereign AI trend — nations building domestic AI capability on their own infrastructure. It follows similar but smaller-scale moves by South Korea's NAVER with NVIDIA and the Gulf states securing chip access. Japan's approach is distinctive in its scale (140MW from day one) and its explicit focus on physical AI and robotics, leveraging the country's traditional manufacturing dominance.

Sources